Verbal Energy
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Vivid verbs defended with verve
Constance Hale's 'Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch' is a good read on writing, especially on the power of verbs.
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Hail to the neologizers in chief
US presidents – and one president in particular – seem to have a knack for coining new terms.
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Etymology notes on a scandal
In the wake of the Petraeus affair, words nerds want to know the derivation of the term 'blackmail.'
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Constitutional copy-editing
Oregonians pass by a landslide a ballot measure to copyedit their state constitution; are there other documents we’d like to tinker with?
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What it means when things 'go viral' on the Web
How did we end up with a disease metaphor to refer to the way information travels through society?
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Life at C-level: too many chiefs?
The Monitor’s language columnist looks at the proliferation of 'C-level' job titles.
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The unbearable smartness of being
The Monitor's language columnist feels the lexical ground shifting on just what 'smartly' means.
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Janus words in the language of dreams
Words with mutually contradictory meanings indicate how our minds cope with complexity.
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Walking back, to avoid climbing down
A pedestrian metaphor proves to have legs in this electoral season
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Sit tight, drive safe, and watch for flat adverbs
An article on women in the CIA offers, in passing, a grammar lesson.
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Flying to center field with the boys of autumn
A newspaper account of a 14-inning ball game makes a point about irregular verbs.
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Earworms and the 'mononymous' phenomenon
Doing a spell-check on a pop singer's name, the Monitor's language columnist is reminded how writers can get words, as well as music, 'stuck' in their ears.
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He perhaps didn't build that sentence very well
A grammar geek has to love it when 'syntax' makes headlines.
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Something we should stop having done
A news story from London's National Gallery illustrates the trouble with something people say every day.
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'I'm finna start training so hard …'
A new form of a familiar idiom shows how an Olympian went for the gold.
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Modulating our opposition to new prepositions
A 'new' preposition, borrowed from the world of math, is a reminder of how closely language allies with logic.
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Letters that simply intrude into our words
The Monitor’s language columnist looks at the way some words gain sounds and others lose them to make them easier to pronounce.
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Moving toward the correct answer on this one
Looking to settle the toward vs. towards question, the Monitor’s language columnist discovers the excrescent “t.”
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A tobacco moment, a fiscal cliff, and a Grexit
It's great to have such memorable shorthand phrases for the complex financial problems we're going through; but a few years from now, will we even remember what they meant?
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The double life of commas
The use of commas, unlike that of other marks of punctuation, is governed by both rules and conventions.
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